The
daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media
regularly cover terrorism, but rarely how the fear of attacks
is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the
common thread of many unreported stories last year, according
to an analysis by Project Censored.

Since
1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey
of the top 25 stories the mainstream media failed to report
or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news
sources, vetted by students and faculty, and ranked by judges,
the stories were not necessarily overtly censored. But their
controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo, or general
under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the
front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by
media analysis, in a book of the same name published annually
by Seven Stories Press.

“This
year, war and civil liberties stood out,” Peter Phillips,
project director since 1996, said of the top stories. “They’re
closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been
the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since
9/11.”

Whether
it’s preventing what one piece of legislation calls “homegrown
terrorism” by federally funding the study of radicalism, using
vague concerns about security to quietly expand NAFTA, or
refusing to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed in
the war, the threat of terrorism is being used to silence
people and expand power.

“The
war on terror is a sort of mind terror,” said Nancy Snow,
one of the project’s 24 judges and an associate professor
of public diplomacy at the Newhouse School of Public Communications
at Syracuse University. Snow—who has taught classes on war,
media, and propaganda—elaborated: “You can’t declare war on
terror. It’s a tactic used by groups to gain publicity and
it will remain with us. But it’s unlikely that [the number
of terrorist acts] will spike. It spikes in the minds of people.”

She pointed
out that terrorist attacks have declined worldwide since 2003.
Some use the absence of fresh attacks as evidence that the
so-called war on terror” is working. But a RAND Corporation
study for the Department of Defense released in August said
the war on terror hasn’t effectively undermined Al Qaeda.

This
year, the landscape of Project Censored itself is expanding.
After talking with educators who bemoan the ongoing decline
of news quality and want to help, Phillips launched the Truth
Emergency Project, in which Sonoma State partners with 23
other universities. All will host classes for students to
search out untold stories, vet them for accuracy, and submit
them for consideration to Project Censored.

“There’s
a renaissance of independent media,” Phillips said. He thinks
bloggers and citizen journalists are filling crucial roles
left vacant by staff cutbacks throughout the mainstream media.
And, he said, it’s time for universities, educators, and media
experts to step in and help.

The Truth
Emergency Project also will host a news service that aggregates
the top 12 independent media sources and posts them on one
page. “So you can get an RSS feed from all the major independent
news sources we trust,” he said. Discerning newshounds can
find reporting from the BBC, Democracy Now!, and Inter Press
Service (IPS) in one spot. “The whole criteria,” he said,
“is no corporate media.”

Carl
Jensen, who started Project Censored in 1976, said the expansion
is a new and necessary phase. “It answers the question I was
always challenged with: How do you know this is the truth?
Having 24 campuses reviewing all the stories and raising questions
really provides a good answer. These stories will be vetted
more than Sarah Palin.”

Here
are Project Censored’s top 10 underreported stories for 2008:

1. How
Many Iraqis Have Died?

Nobody
knows exactly how many lives the Iraq War has claimed. But
even more astounding is that few journalists have mentioned
the issue or cited the top estimate: 1.2 million.

During
August and September 2007, Opinion Research Business, a British
polling group, surveyed 2,414 adults in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces
and found that more than 20 percent had experienced at least
one war-related death since March 2003. Using common statistical
study methods, it determined that as many as 1.2 million people
had been killed since the war began.

The U.S.
military, claiming it keeps no count, still employs civilian
death data as a marker of progress. For example, in a Sept.
10, 2007, report to Congress, Gen. David Petraeus said, “Civilian
deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined
considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height
of the sectarian violence in December.”

But whose
number was he using? Estimates range wildly and are based
on a variety of sources, including hospital, morgue, and media
reports, as well as in- person surveys.

In October
2006, the British medical journal Lancet published
a Johns Hopkins University study vetted by four independent
sources that counted 655,000 dead, based on interviews with
1,849 households. It updated a similar study from 2004 that
counted 100,000 dead. The Associated Press called it “controversial.”

The AP
began its own count in 2005, and by 2006 said that at least
37,547 Iraqis had lost their lives due to war-related violence,
but called it a minimum estimate at best, and didn’t include
insurgent deaths.

Iraq
Body Count, a group of U.S. and U.K. citizens who aggregate
numbers from media reports on civilian deaths, puts the figure
between 87,000 and 95,000. In January 2008, the World Health
Organization and the Iraqi government did door-to-door surveys
of nearly 10,000 households and put the number of dead at
151,000.

The 1.2
million figure is out there, too, which is higher than the
Rwandan genocide death toll and closing in on the 1.7 million
who perished in Cambodia’s Killing Fields. It raises questions
about the real number of deaths from U.S. aerial bombings
and house raids, and challenges the common assumption that
this is a war in which Iraqis are killing Iraqis.

Justifying
the higher number, Michael Schwartz, writing on the blog AfterDowningStreet.org,
pointed to a fact reported by the Brookings Institute that
U.S. troops have, over the last four years, conducted about
100 house raids a day—a number that has increased recently
with assistance from Iraqi soldiers.

Brutality
during these house searches has been documented by returning
soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and independent journalists (See
No. 9 below). Schwartz suggests the aggressive, “element of
surprise” tactics employed by soldiers is likely resulting
in several thousands of deaths a day that are going unreported
or categorized as insurgents being killed.

The spin
is having its intended effect: a February 2007 AP poll showed
Americans gave a median estimate of 9,890 Iraqi deaths as
a result of the war, a number far below that cited in any
credible study.

Coupling
the perennial issue of security with Wall Street’s measures
of prosperity, the leaders of the three North American nations
convened the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The White
House-led initiative—launched at a March 23, 2005, meeting
of President Bush, Mexico’s then-president Vicente Fox, and
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin—joins beefed-up commerce
with coordinated military operations to promote what it calls
“borderless unity.”

Critics
call it “NAFTA on steroids.” However, unlike NAFTA, the SPP
was formed in secret, without public input.

“The
SPP is not a law, or a treaty, or even a signed agreement,”
Laura Carlsen wrote in a report for the Center for International
Policy. “All these would require public debate and participation
of Congress, both of which the SPP has scrupulously avoided.”

Instead,
the SPP has a special workgroup: the North American Competitiveness
Council. It’s a coalition of private companies that are, according
to the SPP Web site, “adding high-level business input [that]
will assist governments in enhancing North America’s competitive
position and engage the private sector as partners in finding
solutions.”

“Where
are the environmental council, the labor council, and the
citizen’s council in this process?” Carlsen asked.

A look
at NAFTA’s unpopularity among citizens in all three nations
is evidence of why its expansion would need to be disguised.
“It’s a scheme to create a borderless North American Union
under U.S. control without barriers to trade and capital flows
for corporate giants, mainly U.S. ones,” wrote Steven Lendman
in Global Research. “It’s also to insure America gets
free and unlimited access to Canadian and Mexican resources,
mainly oil, and in the case of Canada, water as well.”

The FBI
and Department of Homeland Security have effectively deputized
23,000 members of the business community, asking them to tip
off the feds in exchange for preferential treatment in the
event of a crisis. “The members of this rapidly growing group,
called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats
before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before
elected officials,” Matthew Rothschild wrote in the March
2008 issue of The Progressive.

InfraGard
was created in 1996 in Cleveland as part of an FBI probe into
cyberthreats. Yet after 9/11, membership jumped from 1,700
to more than 23,000, and now includes 350 of the nation’s
Fortune 500 companies. Members typically have a stake in one
of several crucial infrastructure industries, including agriculture,
banking, defense, energy, food, telecommunications, law enforcement,
and transportation. Eighty-six chapters coordinate with 56
FBI field offices nationwide.

While
FBI Director Robert Mueller has said he considers this segment
of the private sector “the first line of defense,” the American
Civil Liberties Union issued a grave warning about the potential
for abuse. “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer
to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations—some
of which may be in a position to observe the activities of
millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears
for the FBI,” it cautioned in an August 2004 report.

“The
FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans
who get special treatment,” Jay Stanley, public education
director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program, told
Rothschild.

And they
are privileged: A DHS spokesperson told Rothschild that InfraGard
members receive special training and readiness exercises.
They’re also privy to protected information that is usually
shielded from disclosure under the trade secrets provision
of the Freedom of Information Act.

The information
they have may be of critical importance to the general public,
but first it goes to the privileged membership, sometimes
before it’s released to elected officials. On Nov. 1, 2001,
the FBI sent an alert to InfraGard members about a potential
threat to bridges in California. Barry Davis, who worked for
Morgan Stanley, received the information and relayed it to
his brother Gray, then governor of California, who released
it to the public.

Steve
Maviglio, Davis’s press secretary at the time, told Rothschild,
“The governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information.
In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother,
who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t
the public know?’ “

The School
of the Americas earned an unsavory reputation in Latin America
after many graduates of the Fort Benning, Ga., facility turned
into counterinsurgency death squad leaders. So the International
Law Enforcement Academy recently installed by the Unites States
in El Salvador—which looks, acts, and smells like the SOA—is
also drawing scorn.

The school,
which opened in June 2005, before the Salvadoran National
Assembly approved it, has a satellite operation in Peru and
is funded with $3.6 million from the U.S. Treasury and staffed
with instructors from the DEA, ICE, and FBI and tasked with
training 1,500 police officers, judges, prosecutors, and other
law-enforcement agents a year in counterterrorism techniques.
It’s stated purpose is to make Latin America “safe for foreign
investment” by “providing regional security and economic stability
and combating crime.”

ILEAs
aren’t new, but past schools located in Budapest, Bangkok,
Gaborone, Botswana, and Roswell, N.M., haven’t been terribly
controversial. Yet Salvadoran human-rights organizers take
issue with the fact that, in true SOA fashion, the ILEA releases
neither information about its curriculum nor a list of students
and graduates. Additionally, the way the school slipped into
existence without public oversight has raised ire.

As Wes
Enzinna noted in a North American Congress on Latin America
report, when the United States decided it wanted a training
ground in Latin America, El Salvador was not the first choice.
In 2002, U.S. officials selected Costa Rica, a country that
doesn’t even have an army, as host. The local government signed
on and the plan made headlines. But when citizens learned
about it, they revolted and demanded the government change
the agreement. The United States bailed for a more discreet
second attempt in El Salvador.

“Members
of the U.S. Congress were not briefed about the academy, nor
was the main opposition party in El Salvador, the Farabundo
Martí-National Liberation Front (FMLN),” Enzinna wrote. “But
once the news media reported that the two countries had signed
an official agreement in September, activists in El Salvador
demanded to see the text of the document.” Though they tried
to garner enough opposition, the National Assembly narrowly
ratified it.

Now,
after more than three years in operation, critics point out
that Salvadoran police, who account for 25 percent of the
graduates, have become more violent. A May 2007 report by
Tutela Legal implicated Salvadoran National Police (PNC) officers
in eight death-squad-style assassinations in 2006.

El Salvador’s
ILEA recently received another $2 million in U.S. funding
through the congressionally approved Merida Initiative—but
still refuses to adopt a more transparent curriculum and administration,
despite partnering with a well-known human-rights leader.
Enzinna’s FOIA requests for course materials were rejected
by the government, so no one knows exactly what the school
is teaching, or to whom.

Protesting
war could get you into big trouble, according to a critical
read of two executive orders recently signed by President
Bush. The first, issued July 17, 2007, and titled, “Blocking
property of certain persons who threaten stabilization efforts
in Iraq,” allows the feds to seize assets from anyone who
“directly or indirectly” poses a risk to the U.S. war in Iraq.
And, citing the modern technological ease of transferring
funds and assets, the order states that no prior notice is
necessary before the raid.

On Aug.
1, Bush signed another order, similar but directed toward
anyone undermining the “sovereignty of Lebanon or its democratic
processes and institutions.” In this case, the Secretary of
the Treasury can seize the assets of anyone perceived as posing
a risk of violence, as well as the assets of their spouses
and dependents, and bans them from receiving any humanitarian
aid.

Critics
say the orders bypass the right to due process and the vague
language makes manipulation and abuse possible. Protesting
the war could be perceived as undermining or threatening U.S.
efforts in Iraq. “This is so sweeping, it’s staggering,” said
Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration official in the
Justice Department who editorialized against it in The
Washington Times. “It expands beyond terrorism, beyond
seeking to use violence or the threat of violence to cower
or intimidate a population.”

Sources:
“Bush executive order: criminalizing the antiwar movement,”
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 2007; “Bush’s executive
order even worse than the one on Iraq,” Matthew Rothschild,
The Progressive, Aug. 2007

6. Radicals
= Terrorists

On Oct.
23, 2007, the House of Representatives passed, by a vote of
404-6, the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
Prevention Act,” designed to root out the causes of radicalization
in Americans.

With
an estimated four-year cost of $22 million, the act establishes
a 10-member National Commission on the Prevention of Violent
Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, as well as a university-based
Center of Excellence “to examine the social, criminal, political,
psychological, and economic roots of domestic terrorism,”
according to a press release from the bill’s author, Rep.
Jane Harman (D-Calif.).

During
debate on the bill, Harman said, “Free speech, espousing even
very radical beliefs, is protected by our Constitution. But
violent behavior is not.”

Jessica
Lee, writing in the Indypendent, a newspaper put out
by the New York Independent Media Center, pointed out that
in a later press release, Harman stated: “The National Commission
[will] propose to both Congress and [Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff initiatives to intercede
before radicalized individuals turn violent.”

Which
could be when they’re speaking, writing, and organizing in
ways that are protected by the First Amendment. This redefines
civil disobedience as terrorism, say civil-rights experts,
and the wording is too vague. For example, the definition
of “violent radicalization” is “the process of adopting or
promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating
ideologically based violence to advance political, religious,
or social change.”

“What
is an extremist belief system? Who defines this? These are
broad definitions that encompass so much. . . . It is criminalizing
thought and ideology,” said Alejandro Queral, executive director
of the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center in Portland,
Ore.

Though
the ACLU recommended some changes that were adopted, it continued
to criticize the bill. The story didn’t make it onto the CNN
ticker, but enough independent sources reported on it that
the equivalent Senate Bill 1959 has since stalled. After introducing
the bill, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), later joined forces
with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on a report criticizing
the Internet as a tool for violent Islamic extremism.

Despite
an outcry from civil liberties groups, days after the report
was released, Lieberman demanded that YouTube remove a number
of Islamist propaganda videos. YouTube canned some that broke
their rules regarding violence and hate speech, but resisted
censoring others. The ensuing battle caught the attention
of The New York Times, and on May 25 it editorialized
against Lieberman and SB1959.

About
121,000 people legally enter the United States to work every
year with H-2 visas, a program legislators are touting as
part of future immigration reform. But Rep. Charles Rangel
(D-N.Y.) called this guest-worker program “the closest thing
I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

The Southern
Poverty Law Center likened it to “modern day indentured servitude.”
They interviewed thousands of guest workers and reviewed legal
cases for a report released in March 2007, in which authors
Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds wrote, “Unlike U.S. citizens,
guest workers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection
of a competitive labor market—the ability to change jobs if
they are mistreated. Instead, they are bound to the employers
who ‘import’ them. If guest workers complain about abuses,
they face deportation, blacklisting, or other retaliation.”

When
visas expire, workers must leave the country, hardly making
this the path to permanent citizenship legislators are looking
for. The H-2 program mimics the controversial old bracero
program, established through a joint agreement between Mexico
and the United States in 1942, which brought 4.5 million workers
over the border during its 22 years in existence.

Many
legal protections were written into the program, but in most
cases they existed only on paper, in a language unreadable
to employees. In 1964 the program was shuttered amid scores
of human-rights abuses and complaints that it undermined petitions
for higher wages from U.S. workers. Soon after, United Farm
Workers organized, which César Chávez said would have been
impossible if the bracero program still existed.

Years
later, it essentially still does. The H-2A program, which
accounted for 32,000 agricultural workers in 2005, has many
of the same protections—and many of the same abuses. Even
worse is the H-2B program, used by 89,000 nonagricultural
workers annually, which has none of the same safeguards.

Still,
Mexicans are literally lining up to join, the stark details
of which were reported by Felicia Mello in The Nation.
Furthermore, thousands of illegal immigrants are employed
throughout the country, providing cheap, unprotected labor
and further undermining the scant provisions of the laws.
Labor contractors who connect immigrants with employers are
lining their pockets with cash, while people return home with
very little.

The Bush
administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Department
of Justice has been issuing classified legal opinions about
surveillance for years. As a member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) had access to
the DOJ opinions on presidential power and had three declassified
to show how the judicial branch has, in a bizarre and chilling
way, assisted President Bush in circumventing its own power.

According
to the three memos:

“There
is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue
a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the
terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an
executive order, the President has instead modified or waived
it;”

“The
President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article
II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of
the President’s authority under Article II,” and

“The
Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.”
Or, as Whitehouse rephrased them in a Dec. 7, 2007, Senate
speech: “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t
have to tell you when I’m breaking them. I get to determine
what my own powers are. The Department of Justice doesn’t
tell me what the law is. I tell the Department of Justice
what the law is.”

The issue
arose within the context of the Protect America Act, which
expands government surveillance powers and gives telecom companies
legal immunity for helping. Whitehouse called it, “a second-rate
piece of legislation passed in a stampede in August at the
behest of the Bush administration.”

He pointed
out that the act does not prohibit spying on Americans overseas—with
the exception of an executive order that permits surveillance
only of Americans whom the Attorney General determines to
be “agents of a foreign power.”

“In other
words, the only thing standing between Americans traveling
overseas and government wiretap is an executive order,” Whitehouse
said in an April 12 speech. “An order this president, under
the first legal theory I cited, claims he has no legal obligation
to obey.”

Whitehouse,
a former U.S. Attorney, went on to point out that Marbury
vs. Madison, written by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803,
established that it is “emphatically the province and duty
of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

Hearing
soldiers recount their war experiences is the closest many
people come to understanding the real horror, pain, and confusion
of combat. One would think that might make compelling copy
or powerful footage for a news outlet. But in March, when
more than 300 veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
convened for four days of public testimony on the war, they
were largely ignored by the media.

Winter
Soldier was designed to give soldiers a public forum to air
some of the atrocities they witnessed. Originally convened
by Vietnam Vets Against the War in January 1971, it included
more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians describing
their war experiences, including rapes, torture, brutalities,
and killing of noncombatants. The testimony was entered into
the Congressional Record and filmed and shown at the Cannes
Film Festival.

Iraq
Veterans Against the War hosted the 2008 reprise of the 1971
hearings. Aaron Glantz, writing in One World, recalled
testimony from former Marine Cpl. Jason Washburn, who said,
“His commanders encouraged lawless behavior. ‘We were encouraged
to bring “drop weapons,” or shovels. In case we accidentally
shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and
pretend they were an insurgent.’ ”

An investigation
by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in The Nation that
included interviews with 50 Iraq war veterans also revealed
an overwhelming lack of training and resources and a general
lawlessness with regard to the traditional rules of war.

Few major
news outlets made it to Silver Spring, Md., for the Winter
Soldier hearings. Fortunately, KPFA and Pacifica Radio broadcast
the testimonies live and, in an update to the story, said
they were “deluged with phone calls, e-mails, and blog posts
from service members, veterans, and military families thanking
us for breaking a cultural norm of silence about the reality
of war.” Testimonies can still be heard at www.ivaw.org.

Psychologists
have been assisting the CIA and U.S. military with interrogation
and torture of Guantánamo detainees—which the American Psychological
Association has said is fine, despite objections from many
in its 148,000 members.

A 10-member
APA task force convened on the divisive issue in July 2005
and found that assistance from psychologists was making the
interrogations safe and it deferred to U.S. standards on torture
over international human-rights definitions.

The group
was criticized by APA members for deliberating in secret,
and later it was revealed that six of the 10 had ties to the
armed services. Not only that, but as Katherine Eban reported
in Vanity Fair, “Psychologists, working in secrecy,
had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators
in them while on contract to the CIA.”

In particular,
psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of
whom are APA members, honed a classified military training
program known as SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape]
that teaches soldiers how to tough out torture if captured
by enemies. “Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics
inflicted on SERE trainees for use on detainees in the global
war on terror,” Eban wrote.

And,
as Mark Benjamin noted in a Salon article, employing SERE
training—which is designed to replicate torture tactics that
don’t abide by Geneva Convention standards—refutes past administration
assertions that current CIA torture techniques are safe and
legal. “Soldiers undergoing SERE training are subject to forced
nudity, stress positions, lengthy isolation, sleep deprivation,
sexual humiliation, exhaustion from exercise, and the use
of water to create a sensation of suffocation,” Benjamin wrote.

Eban’s
story outlined how SERE tactics were spun as “science,” despite
a lack of data and criticism that building rapport works better
than blows to the head. Specifically, he said, it’s been misreported
that CIA torture techniques got Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah
to talk, when it was actually FBI rapport-building. In spite
of this, SERE techniques became standards in interrogation
manuals that eventually made their way to U.S. officers guarding
Abu Ghraib.

Ongoing
uproar within the APA resulted in a petition to make an official
policy limiting psychologists’ involvement in interrogations.
On Sept. 17, a majority of 15,000 voting members approved
a resolution stating that psychologists may not work in settings
where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either
International Law . . . or the U.S. Constitution (where appropriate),
unless they are working directly for the persons being detained
or for an independent third party working to protect human
rights.”